Of Holes and A-Holes

[Tonus]

Holes are a lack of material, right? So they're amaterialists!

[bennyboy]

The hole doesn't exist. Our brain interprets the light of material that DOES exist, draws an imaginary border in space, and treats the two sides of the border as a conceptual "fence." In other words, that border is an IDEA, as is the idea that the lack of stuff on one side of it is a "thing." If you're attempting to prove that God exists as an idea, then you have succeeded.

[Exian]

I ask this genuinely and not at all Socratically- Wouldn't the same methods used to identify an entity as separate from its surroundings be the same to describe a hole?

[genkaus]

The hole doesn't exist. Our brain interprets the light of material that DOES exist, draws an imaginary border in space, and treats the two sides of the border as a conceptual "fence." In other words, that border is an IDEA, as is the idea that the lack of stuff on one side of it is a "thing."

The same could be said of everything in existence. We are essentially interpreting light of the material to draw conceptual borders to give distinct identities to what is one big continuum. Does that mean none of it exists?

[Aoi Magi]

All of it is a hologram.....muahahaha

[bennyboy]

The hole doesn't exist. Our brain interprets the light of material that DOES exist, draws an imaginary border in space, and treats the two sides of the border as a conceptual "fence." In other words, that border is an IDEA, as is the idea that the lack of stuff on one side of it is a "thing."

The same could be said of everything in existence. We are essentially interpreting light of the material to draw conceptual borders to give distinct identities to what is one big continuum. Does that mean none of it exists?

Only as ideas drawn from incomplete perceptions.

Look at a calm lake. Does it really have a smooth "surface"? No, how could it? It consists of a bunch of particles vibrating in space. But we take light from some of those particles, map a virtual border, and call it a surface.

The difference is that this simplification works: if a ball hits a "virtual" border called a wall, it bounces, and we don't need to see the gazillion individual moments of all the particles it includes.

God, on the other hand, doesn't see to be a conceptualization which represents any useful fact about our lives.

[Angrboda]

Almost everyone knows what a part and a whole are; they are some of the first concepts that children or infants learn. A ball is made up of two halves, so the ball is a whole that is made up of two parts. Every single object we experience in the world outside of us and around us is a whole that has parts, and we never experience an object that does not have parts. For example, a tail is a part of a lion, a cloud is a part of a greater weather system or, in visual terms, the sky, and a nucleobase is a part of a DNA strand. The only things we know of that do not have parts are the smallest items known to exist, such as leptons and quarks, which can't be 'seen', so are not experienced—at least not directly, but indirectly through emergent properties. Thus all objects we experience have parts.

A number of philosophers have argued that objects that have parts do not exist. The basis of their argument consists in claiming that our senses give us only foggy information about reality and thus they cannot be trusted; and for example, we fail to see the smallest building blocks that make up anything, and these smallest building blocks are individual and separate items that do not ever unify or come together into being non-individual. Thus they never compose anything. So, according to the concept of mereological nihilism, if the building blocks of reality never compose any whole items, then all of reality does not involve any whole items, even though we may think it does.

Wikipedia | Mereological nihilism

[vorlon13]

I liked it in the cartoons when the Roadrunner could pick up a hole and move it.

[JesusHChrist]

I always wondered how he did that

[vorlon13]

Collapsed the wavefunction of the probabilistic determinatrix of the hole location and essentially quantum tunneled it to a new invex.